Judges in the trial against three Russians and one Ukrainian accused of involvement in the downing of Malaysia Airlines MH17 have granted several requests for further investigation.
The two Dutch lawyers of the Russian suspect Oleg Pulatov and their own experts are allowed to examine the aircraft wreckage, which is displayed in a hangar at a Dutch military airfield.
The Dutch court also advised the lawyers to contact United States authorities themselves to request access to American satellite images that reportedly show a missile launch at the moment the aircraft was shot down on July 14, 2014. The international Joint Investigation Team (JIT) previously asked Washington for these images, but according to the official account, such images do not exist.
That US denial appears to conflict with earlier statements by then-Secretary of State John Kerry, who in a TV interview a week after the MH17 was shot down said almost literally that satellite images show the launch site and the smoke plume of the missile being fired upwards.
Kerry probably misspoke then because his statements could be seen as confirmation that the US has (military espionage) satellites that watch in real time, apparently everywhere in the world. Kerry was not talking about video images from a circling drone, but about images from a satellite in space. The interview with Kerry, as far as is known, was never broadcast again.
Pulatov's lawyers, who emphasize that he was a lieutenant colonel in the Russian army, submitted a long list of requests last month for further investigation, witness hearings, and opinions from other experts. They accuse the JIT prosecutors of tunnel vision because they almost exclusively focused on the theory that the aircraft was shot down by a Russian Buk missile. All 298 passengers and crew of MH17 died in that attack.
After years of investigation by an international team, the prosecutors last year indicted four suspects: Russians Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinskiy, and Oleg Pulatov, as well as Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko. None of them appeared in the trial held before the heavily secured court at Schiphol Airport.
The defense seeks further investigation into alternative scenarios, including that the passenger plane was shot down by a Ukrainian Air Force fighter jet or by a missile fired by Ukrainian forces. Presiding Judge Henk Steenhuis has rejected some requests and postponed decisions on others until the Dutch lawyers have had the opportunity to speak with their client Pulatov.